Page 43 of Knot the Plan
He was not out that way. Sutter's is forty minutes in the wrong direction and we both know it.
“You drove eighty minutes round trip to bring me bread,” I say.
“Seventy-five,” he corrects, easy as anything, like we didn't have this exact argument two days ago. “And I drove it to see your face when I hand you the bread, which is a different thing and a better one. You going to let me in, or are we doing this on the step for the neighbors.”
I let him in. Tactical error. The list of my tactical errors this week could paper the hallway.
It'sfine for about ten minutes.
That's the lie I tell myself, anyway, while it is very much not fine. We stand in my kitchen and he unpacks the bread like it's a delivery of state secrets, and I make tea I don't want so my hands have a job, and the whole time my body is conducting its own quiet betrayal three feet to my left.
Because he fills a kitchen, Hudson. Sleeves shoved up, forearms I have opinions about, that easy loose-limbed way he leans against my counter like he was poured there.
And his scent is everywhere now, juniper and clean rain, winding through my small kitchen and curling low into me, andthe part of me I've kept on a leash for six years lifts its head and leans toward it before I can haul it back. My skin's too warm. It's been too warm all day, the suppressants barely holding, and standing this close to him is pouring fuel on it.
We're talking, easy, the way we're always easy, and I am not hearing a word of it. I'm watching his mouth move. I'm thinking about that mouth at the overlook, the sound he made, the weight of him. I'm aware of every inch of the space between us and exactly how little of it there is, and my heart is going like I've been running, and somewhere under all of it my body is making a low insistent case I am trying very hard not to listen to.
Then I turn around with two mugs and he's closer than I thought, and his scent floods me at this distance, and the talking just stops.
He looks at me. I look at him. The kettle ticks as it cools.
“I've been thinking about that kiss since I dropped you off,” he says. Not grinning now. “You in my lap on that tailgate. I want to do it again, Josie. I'm done pretending I don't.” His eyes drop to my mouth and come back up, slow. “Your move, Porter. I'm not going to be the one who decides this for you.”
“Then stop talking,” I say. My voice comes out low, unsteady.
He grins, just for a second. Then he takes the mugs out of my hands and sets them down somewhere behind me without looking, and his hands come back empty and settle light on my hips, asking, not taking. “I've been trying to be a gentleman about this since a kayak, and I'm starting to think you don't actually want me to be.”
“This is a terrible idea,” I tell him, with my hands already flat against his chest, not pushing.
“The worst,” he agrees, and kisses me.
It's not the slow careful thing from the tailgate. There's no audience to perform restraint for, no truck, no cold to drive me home from. Just my kitchen and his mouth and the wall he walksme back into, gentle, one hand cradling my head before it can meet the cabinet. Taking care of me even now. Even like this.
Whatever I've been holding down all day stops holding. It's every suppressant I swallowed losing an argument it was never going to win. And I should be scared of that, and instead I'm fisting my hands in his shirt and pulling him closer, because for once in my life the thing my body wants and the thing I want are the same thing, pointed in the same direction, and his name.
“Josie.” He pulls back an inch, breathing hard, his forehead on mine. His thumb strokes my cheek. “Tell me to go home and I'll go home. I mean it. Say the word.”
The out. He's handing it to me on purpose, the way he hands me everything, easy, no pressure, a door held open in case I want to walk back through it to the version of this where I'm still pretending.
I think about being the easy one. The fine one. The one who never makes a fuss, who keeps everybody else's glass full and goes home to an empty one and calls it the deal. I think about a man who drove eighty minutes to watch my face.
“Don't go home,” I say.
He kissesme like I've handed him something he didn't think he'd get. Then he kisses my jaw, and my throat, slow, taking his time, and I feel him smile against my skin when my breath catches, and he murmurs, “There she is,” low and warm, and sinks to his knees on my kitchen floor like it's the most natural place in the world for him to be.
“Hudson.”
“I just want a taste,” he says, looking up at me, hands sliding to the waistband of my shorts, patient, waiting for the no that doesn't come. “Been thinking about it since the lake. What you'd taste like. The sounds you'd make. Whether you'd let me get mymouth on you and not stop till you're shaking.” His thumbs hook into the fabric. “Let me. I'll be so good, you have no idea how good I can be.”
He's grinning, the rascal, even now, even here, but his hands are reverent and his eyes have gone dark and serious under the grin, and the contradiction of him, the joke and the want fused into one man kneeling on my kitchen tile, undoes me more thoroughly than anything I've ever seen.
I say yes. I don't say it out loud. I say it with my hands in his hair and my hips tipping toward him, and he reads me like he always reads me, and then my shorts are gone, my underwear with them, and he just looks at me for a second, and whatever he sees makes the grin slide off his face entirely.
“Fuck, Josie.” His voice has gone rough, wrecked. “Look at you. You're soaked. That for me?”
“Hudson—”
“That's for me.” He says it low, like something he gets to keep now. And then he hauls one of my legs over his shoulder and licks into me, one long slow drag, and the kitchen tilts.
